Diablo® III

I'm nearly the end of act one and already my dogs are either getting one shot by certain abilities, or dying within a couple of seconds, they're basically useless. I know in the beta they never died in earlier patches and that wasn't right either, but neither is this.

Sacrifice is cool.

youll get a choice for a skill which gives some pets 20% ekstra health.

The dogs are dying quite fast even at the beginning of act 2 "sadface" right now im popping them to just make them BOOM.

Serves you right for sending those cute little puppy wuppies against those mean old skelly wellies...

are the other skills better? coz this seems pretty useless ? i doubt the 20% extra health will really do the trick

Finished the game on normal about an hour ago and while I agree dogs are kinda weak, I think they are fine specially early on when 90% of your mana goes on Acid cloud (arguably the best skill during normal, imo)

Personally I was running them with life link and they didn't really die that early, had no cooldown issues at all with resummoning them before all were dead basically.

And no, I wouldn't bother with jungle fortitude - Spiritial attunement and then blood ritual once you hit 20 offer you way more regardless of your build.

If there is a skill that needs a buff, I would say it is big bad voodoo. The combination of tiny aoe, short duration and long cd just makes it so weak. None of the bosses really allow you stand still in the aoe and keep hitting anyway, and even if they do that 20% AS isn't that huge deal while the 20% MS boost is pretty much useless because of the tiny aoe.
I realize the spell gets better later on with runes, but still it is so situational that there is very few cases one should sacrafice a skill slot for it. Personally I think they need to atleast make the fetish move around.

u finished normal?

Zombie dogs are terrible.

I ran Jungle Fort, Zombie Handler and tried with/without Life Link and they just get destroyed instantly in any fight that has multiple tough enemies (which is probably about 30-40% of fights, considering you're chain pulling then that's a lot of time with them dead).

Unless items with zombie dog skill up gives them a serious buff, or they scale amazingly with vitality then I can't see them being any use atall in Hell/Inferno as they'll just be dead constantly...

Gargantuan however is amazing, he hardly ever dies and is a real tank. Not sure the point of the dogs now really as they're too weak to do much tanking and their damage is pretty terrible, so unless you use a sacrifice build...

I was happy when i got gargantua....now we talking!

Pretty much the only good (read awsome!) thing about them is when you have sacrifice runed with next of kin. Basicly they are a huge AoE suicide bomb on a 60 sec CD. :)
I play with the Garganthuan and Templar, so they take care of the tanking for me.

droped them for spirit walk

spirit walk--> soul harverst 5 ---> go berserk

Anyone know if the nightmare scaling makes pet viable there?

They are really weak, they die in like 20 seconds. BUFF THEM!

They do suck like and if we are blowing them up 60secs cd is a long time for a cd when we are just killing them.

dogs dies really fast, its better to replace the dogs with queen spider for more damage. (the spider cant die, do more aoe damage and have no cooldown). They need to buff the dogs and reduce the cooldown for it to be viable. Gargantuan is better for main pet.

After level 25 they seems to be really powerfull, i got the 20% heatlh, 4th dog and change on sacrifice to summon another dog and they barely never die. They were horrible before lvl 24.25 tho.

When you re talking about them being weak is that with the use of Jungle fortitude?

Reduces all damage taken by you and your pets by 20%. This seems like a major buff to me

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/class/witch-doctor/passive/jungle-fortitude

They dont die so much when I used a shield